Friday, May 08, 2009

Alternate page from ORIGINS 3

Here's a little behind the scenes info for you hard core fans.

There is a page in ORIGINS #3 where Chimera (the really, really bad guy) is explaining how he killed his families (yeah, plural). I don't like to pretty up violence (since it's never really pretty, especially if it involves women) so I tried to tell a story with the blood trail, show a bit of the struggle and just how ugly a thing it was to do.

Hasbro asked (very nicely I might add) if I could tone it down, which I did for the final comic. They let me keep the puddle under the poor woman, but everything else went. The page still packs a punch, maybe a tad more of one since it's so focused on the person and not the blood.

4 comments:

Nice stuff, Mike. I might venture to say that this is some of the best stuff I've seen you do in print. I think it's great that you go ahead and hint at the violence that's happened, and let the readers imagination do the rest. There's not enough of that in comics or film these days. The imagination is always more powerful than an image we can produce on paper.

You know, I think you handled it in the best way possible. It was a violent situation and you had to display that this emotionally psychotic person did some horrible things. You certainly didn't sugar coat it but still gave enough visual clues to show, this wasn't a "pretty" killing. So mad props for that alone.

I still think I read an interview with Eisner somewhere when he said the greatest image of fear and terror happened off the panel. Same with Hitchcock, he didn't need to show the gore and blood, your mind could do that for you. And each person could be thinking something entirely different.